Jessica Warboys — Land & Sea — Le Crédac, Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: April 8 → June 12, 2011

Warboys often fashions her new worlds from personal or collective memories or even significant events. Her work involves a range of practices, including film, sculpture, painting and even performance. And although her pieces display a performative aspect, Warboys doesn’t consider herself a performance artist. She is interested in the juncture and transition between ritual, performance and the artistic process. Indeed the theatrical aspect that runs through her work occasionally adds a mysterious dimension to it.

For Sea Paintings, for example, a series of large-format pictures that will be mounted in Crédac’s biggest hall, the artist plunged the canvases in the sea. The movement of the waves and the wind also left traces on the pigment, which the artist applied earlier by hand. This process, related to both performance and gestural improvisation, is akin to the way Warboys designs her video pieces, in which the narrative is gradually revealed through the editing like a puzzle.

In the same gallery Warboys is also presenting on a single screen a trilogy made up of two recent films and a new work that was shot in February 2011 in London’s Victoria Park especially for this show. The film’s starting point is a piece of furniture with a plate of glass posed outside in the park, along with a play of mirrors already seen in the 2010 film La forêt de Fontainebleau (The Fontainebleau Forest), from this same trilogy. In Marie de France, a voice is heard reading a poem by Marie de France, a 12th-century woman poet who, like Warboys, lived between London and Paris. The viewer confronts a play of outdoor and indoor settings. A human presence is suggested and gives rise to the birth of a painting, produced from the technique of marbling.